A dream that shook science

"I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper"

Few minds have contributed as much to science as the mind of Dmitry Mendeleyev. His passion for science began as a love for Physics, but he eventually built his career studying and researching Chemistry. While young Dmitry was considered slow, his mind developed rapidly. By the time he was a young adult, he was considered brilliant. In college, he began publishing papers that challenged the scientific world. It was his passion for Chemistry that guided him to one of the greatest scientific achievement of the 19th Century - The Periodic Table of Elements.

In 1869, while working on the second volume of his groundbreaking book "The Principles of Chemistry", Dmitry became entranced with how to group the elements - the basic building blocks of the universe. Dmitry had written the first volume over the course of four years, but he planned to write the first three chapters of the second volume in just four days. After three days of continuous work without any sleep, Dmitry knew he was close to completing the third chapter and was also about to uncover a huge discovery.

Then, during a quick nap, the periodic table of elements appeared to him in a dream. This photograph, taken in 1905, captures the chemist near the end of his life.

Today, the periodic table is still considered one of the greatest inventions in the field of chemistry which makes Dmitry one of the greatest scientists of all time on the scale as Joseph Priestly's(1733-1804) discovery of oxygen, Albert Einstein's(1879-1955) theory of relativity, and Charles Darwin's( 1809-1882) theory of evolution.

In 1890, when Dmitry was nearly sixty years old, he retired from his teaching position at St. Petersburg University. By the, he had been a part of the university for more than forty years, since he was a student there. According to Woodrow Wilson National Felloship Foundation, Dmitry said in his last lecture at the university:

"I have achieved an inner freedom. There is nothing in this world that I fear to say. No one or anything can silence me. This is a good feeling. This is the feeling of a man. I want you to have this feeling too-it is my moral responsibility to help you achieve this inner freedom. I am an evolutionist of a peaceable type. Proceed in a logical and systemic manner"

After retiring from the university, the Russian govt. hired Dmitry as the director of the Bureau of Weights and Measures, which monitors and assists scientific research and programs. He remained an active and popular figure in the world of science until his death.

Today the periodic table of elements is revised as each new element is discovered. But even today's periodic table bears a striking resemblance to Dmitry's original table. More than 140 years old, Dmitry's table is still the foundation of modern chemistry. Dmitry's periodic table had also inspired other fields of science such as Biology, Nuclear Physics, studies in DNA, and even pushed scientists to inquire about how the universe began - The Big Bang Theory had emerged in the early 1900s!